TAMPA, Fla. — Firefighter Tanja Vidovic’s career with Tampa Fire Rescue is now over, following her official departure from the department last weekend. She had been on light duty for the past year-and-a-half following injuries to her shoulder and neck that she suffered on the job. 

She says she has mixed emotions after leaving the department that she began working for in 2008.

“I feel like there was such a great opportunity with this job to really make a difference in the community, and I didn’t get that chance,” she said last Wednesday after leaving Tampa Fire Rescue headquarters for the last time. 

In 2015, Vidovic filed a charge of discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that three captains asked her for sex and retaliated against her after she complained about several issues, including a lack of female bathrooms at most station houses.

She then sued the city of Tampa in 2016 for what she claimed was years of harassment, discrimination and retaliation by her superiors and coworkers. She was fired the next day. In 2017, a federal jury ruled that she was discriminated against because she was pregnant, and that the city had retaliated against her when she complained. 

Vidovic went back to her job in 2018. She is stepping down after having been injured on the job a year-and-a-half ago and had been working light duty since then.

In addition to her tenure as a firefighter/paramedic, Vidovic has hosted a radio show on sustainable living on WMNF 88.5. In 2020, she made an unsuccessful bid for mayor Safety Harbor, where she's lived for the past six years.

Vidovic's career at Tampa Fire Rescue was bumpy. Just months after being reinstated back with the agency, the Tampa Bay Times reported that she was being investigated by the department for creating a hostile work environment. The hearing ultimately ended without any charges being filed against her (Vidovic says that there was more than one hearing, with none of them ever turning up anything).

Spectrum Bay News 9 asked her last week why she chose to return back to a department in 2018 that she said was stacked against women and people of color.

“I always have hard times leaving situations of injustice,” she recounted. “And it was nonstop that both women and men and people of color would come to me and say ‘I’m being discriminated against at work. There’s a hostile working environment. What do I do?’ And they were afraid to come forward, so the problem is that I felt an obligation to stay because the work isn’t done. “

Vidovic has pushed for years for change at Tampa Fire Rescue, specifically when it comes to addressing the needs for female firefighters.  She says that there have been some positive moves made recently, but much more needs to be done. In October, she sent a list of ten requests to the Tampa City Council and spoke before them on October 7. Among those proposals was a five-year plan to add women’s bathrooms to all stations that don’t have them. Another would be to create non-discrimination/retaliation-based breastfeeding/pumping policy.

Statistics show that women firefighters are a distinct minority in most firehouses around the country. A 2020 report estimated that they made up just 8% of all firefighters working in the country.

A 2019 paper published by the Center for Fire, Rescue & EMS Health Research found that 37% of women firefighters reported experiences sexual advances and verbal harassment.

“There have been several captains who made sexual advances towards me. After I turned one of them down, he made me scrub the dumpster, inside and out,” she recounted last week.

But she also says that the problems that she encountered transcend Tampa Fire Rescue.

“A significant amount of women are quitting because either the facilities aren’t great or they’re being skipped on promotions,” she says.

Vidovic’s candidacy for mayor of Safety Harbor became acrimonious, and it prompted former Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, who was in charge when Vidovic sued the city, to get involved. He cut a campaign ad for the incumbent, Joe Ayoub.

“If you want more division, more dysfunction in city government, you have an option,” Buckhorn said in the ad, referring to Vidovic.

Current city officials also haven’t been particularly sympathetic to Vidovic’s allegations.

“As far as discrimination, I’ve never experienced any and being a female and also a female of color, I would think I would be one of the targets that would have experienced this, and I can’t say that I’ve experienced that,” Tampa Fire Rescue Chief Barbara Tripp told the Tampa City Council in October. Tripp was chosen by Tampa Mayor Jane Castor last year to lead the department, becoming the first Black female chief in department history.

“My career would have been a lot easier if I would have just kept my mouth shut,” Vidovic acknowledged last week, but said that she feels that there has been progress made since 2008. “I mean, we have privacy in the dorms now. Before they didn’t. There were just open bunks. I mean, there’s more women’s bathrooms. We have paid pregnancy leave. They’re looking into getting [women specific] gear.”

So, what’s next for her? She says whatever it is, it won’t be in Florida. She plans to move with her family out of state.

“We’re probably just going to leave,” she said after she left Tampa Fire Rescue headquarters last week. “There’s a lot of hard feelings for me, being in this area with everything that happened with Tampa Fire and local politics and everything.”